Descendant Chart Sample

Viewing the sample charts from Virginia and Mike and using Virginia's tutorials inspired and taught me to make my own charts. I shared the chart based on TMG's sample database with Virginia and she asked me to post it to the forum – see below. I'd also like to share both Virginia's palette modified to my situation and then a chart tailored exactly for my family.

So far, I've only worked with the descendant format in the waterfall style. My goal was to compress 3 generations on a page as we've seen in some of the beautiful examples on the forum. The color scheme was adopted from one already in place for organizing my materials, based on yellow for direct ancestors and pink for ancestor's siblings. That required the addition of the legend explaining my color scheme. (The grand logic behind color scheme was that both yellow and pink papers were on hand when the organization project began! )

Then I tried to put myself in the place of family members viewing the chart and answer the questions they might ask. That's how the little pale yellow informational boxes developed.

Some of the families had a large number of children and I was always asking myself how many were boys and how many were girls. That led to the colored borders around the boxes based on the old-fashioned color scheme of "blue is for boys and pink is for girls."

While I appreciate the importance of spouses, I wanted the related-by-blood people to have the most emphasis, leading to gray fill for spouses. If the spouses also happened to be related via another line, his/her box did receive a colored border (blue/boys, pink/girls).

It was very tedious to repeat formatting of titles, subtitles, note boxes, etc, so I added some of the "boilerplate" notes to the palette file Virginia supplied us so that it was easy to copy and paste.

I hope you can see how I started with the structures previously displayed on the forum and then liberally abused them to answer anticipated questions and jog my memory. I also took the easy way wherever possible by adding common formats to Virginia's palette file. A shockingly bad memory led to the checklist shown below. It is very likely the format will be tweaked as feedback is received.